Google Cloud Platform Adds Load Balancing To Provide More Scale Out Capability And Control To Developers

Google has added new load balancing to Google Compute Engine, giving Google App Engine further scale-out capabilities. Google has also added new Ruby support for Datastore and improved PHP runtime.

The new load balancing feature allows developers to route traffic across a collection of servers, do health checks, automatically handle spikes in data loads and configure the load balancer via command line interface (CLI) and a programmatic RESTful API.

The new features are significant as they show the greater control that Google is giving to developers on the Google Cloud Platform, which is known for its high degree of management. Contrast that with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which gives users an open slate to build and manage their own stacks.

The “Layer 3 Support” will be extended on a regular basis. The service is free through the end of the year.

Google has also added Ruby support for Google Datastore. Developers can now spin out applications on the NoSQL datastore. It is similar to the initial release of Cloud Datastore that included code snippets and samples for getting up and running with Java, Python and Node.

Google is also offering support for GQL, its SQL-like syntax for querying Google Datastore.

The new updates additionally include more support for the PHP runtime, as well as:

  • Improved support for working with directories in Google Cloud Storage
  • The ability to write metadata to Cloud Storage files
  • Performance improvements through “memcache-backed optimistic read caching” — improving the performance of applications that need to read frequently from the same Cloud Storage file.

Google App Engine demonstrates how data-driven companies now rule the day. Google is built on an infrastructure that makes it possible to code almost anything and rapidly create new digital products that are entirely service-related or even hardware and software integrations. Smartphones, netbooks, Internet TV — all are connected to the code and Google’s massive infrastructure.